Rain falls down. That makes sense — gravity pulls water toward the ground. But hail? Those aren't gentle drops. Those are ice chunks, sometimes as big as golf balls, crashing onto roofs and denting cars. How does ice even get up there in the first place?

It starts with a regular raindrop, high inside a thundercloud where the air is freezing cold. But here's the weird part: that drop doesn't fall. Instead, powerful winds inside the cloud — called updrafts — push it UP, like a leaf caught in a gust.

Up there, way above where airplanes fly, the temperature is well below freezing. The raindrop freezes into a tiny ball of ice. You'd think it would drop now — it's heavier than water. But the updraft is STRONG, like a fan pointed at the ceiling, and it holds that ice ball up.

As the ice ball hangs there, more water droplets bump into it and freeze onto its surface, like building a snowman by packing on more snow. The hailstone grows a layer. Then another. Then another. Each trip through the wet, cold parts of the cloud adds a new frozen shell.

Sometimes the updraft weakens and the hailstone starts to fall — but then it hits another blast of rising air and gets shoved back UP into the freezing zone. It's like a roller coaster that keeps climbing. Each loop adds more ice. The hailstone grows heavier.

This cycle can repeat five, ten, even twenty times. The hailstone becomes a lumpy sphere, packed with layer after layer of ice. Eventually it's too heavy even for the strongest updraft. Gravity wins. The hailstone finally falls.

By the time it reaches the ground, that hailstone might be the size of a pea, a marble, or — in extreme storms — a baseball. The bigger the hail, the more trips it made through the cloud's freezing engine. You're seeing the result of a wild ride.

So hail doesn't start in the sky as ice. It starts as rain, gets caught in a storm's powerful up-and-down winds, and builds itself layer by layer until it's too heavy to stay aloft. Next time you see hail, you're watching ice that couldn't stop riding the storm's elevator.